Schopenhauer the basis of morality pdf

Schopenhauer , E. Payne , Richard J. Taylor Published 9 July Psychology, Philosophy entirely unsubstantial conceptions, floating in the air equally with ourselves. It is from these, or, more correctly, from the mere form of their connection with judgments made, that a Law is declared to proceed, which by so-called absolute necessity is supposed to be valid, and to be strong enough to lay bit and bridle on the surging throng of human desires, on the storm of passion, on the giant might of egoism.

We shall see if such be the case. With this preconceived notion that the basis of… Expand. Save to Library Save. Create Alert Alert. Share This Paper. Background Citations. Methods Citations. Citation Type. Great book, The Basis of Morality pdf is enough to raise the goose bumps alone. Add a review Your Rating: Your Comment:. Morality Play by Barry Unsworth. Essays and Aphorisms by Arthur Schopenhauer. For what I do is always what I will; consequently also what I do to myself is never anything but what I will, therefore it cannot be unjust.

Next, as regards duties towards ourselves based on love. Ethics here finds her work already done, and comes too late. The impossibility of violating the duty of self-love is at once assumed by the first law of Christian Morals: "Love thy neighbour as thyself.

Moreover, self-love would be the sole duty regularly involving an opus supererogationis. But it has an amusing effect in cases where people begin to show anxiety about their persons, and talk quite earnestly of the duty of self-preservation; the while it is sufficiently clear that fear will lend them legs soon enough, and that they have no need of any law of duty to help them along. First among the duties towards ourselves is generally placed that of not committing suicide, the line of argument taken being extremely prejudiced and resting on the shallowest basis.

Unlike animals, man is not only a prey to bodily pain limited to the passing moment, but also to those incomparably greater mental sufferings, which, reaching forwards and backwards, draw upon the future and the past; and nature, by way of compensation, has granted to man alone the privilege of being able to end his life at his own pleasure, before she herself sets a term to it; thus, while animals necessarily live so long as they can, man need only live so long as he will.

Whether he ought on ethical grounds to forego this privilege is a difficult question, which in any case cannot be decided by the usual superficial reasoning. The arguments against suicide which Kant does not deem unworthy of adducing p. It is laughable indeed to suppose that reflections of such a kind could have wrested the dagger from the hands of Cato, of Cleopatra, of Cocceius Nerva Tac.

If real moral motives for not committing suicide actually exist, it is certain that they lie very deep, and cannot be reached by the plummet of ordinary Ethics. They belong to a higher view of things than is adaptable even to the standpoint of the present treatise.

That which generally comes next on the rubric of duties towards ourselves may be divided partly into rules of worldly wisdom, partly into hygienic prescriptions; but neither class belongs to Morals in the proper sense.

Last on the catalogue comes the prohibition of unnatural lust—onanism, paederastia, and bestiality. Of these onanism is mainly a vice of childhood, and must be fought against much more with the weapon of dietetics than with that of ethics; hence we find that the authors of books directed against it are physicians e.

After dietetics and hygiene [Pg 41] have done their work, and struck it down by irrefutable reasoning, if Ethics desires to take up the matter, she finds little left for her to do. Bestiality, again, is of very rare occurrence; it is thoroughly abnormal and exceptional, and, moreover, so loathsome and foreign to human nature, that itself, better than all arguments of reason, passes judgment on itself, and deters by sheer disgust. For the rest, as being a degradation of human nature, it is in reality an offence against the species as such, and in the abstract; not against human units.

Of the three sexual perversions of which we are speaking it is consequently only with paederastia that Ethics has to do, and in treating of Justice this vice finds its proper place.

For Justice is infringed by it, in face of which fact, the dictum volenti non fit injuria is unavailing. The injustice consists in the seduction of the younger and inexperienced person, who is thereby ruined physically and morally.

Sometimes we see a physician, after having employed a certain remedy with conspicuous success, henceforth prescribing it for almost all diseases; to such a one Kant may be likened. By separating the a priori from the a posteriori in human knowledge he made the most brilliant and pregnant discovery that Metaphysics can boast of. What wonder then that thereafter he should try to apply this method, this sundering of the two forms, everywhere, and should consequently make Ethics also consist of two parts, a pure, i.

The latter of these he rejects as unreliable for the purpose of founding Ethics. He asserts in fact that the Moral Law , which without warrant, [Pg 43] without deduction, or proof of any sort, he postulates as existing, is furthermore a Law knowable a priori and independent of all internal or external experience ; it " rests " he says " solely on conceptions of pure Reason; and is to be taken as a synthetic proposition a priori " Kritik der Praktischen Vernunft : p.

But from this definition the implication immediately follows that such a Law can only be formal, like everything else known a priori , and consequently has only to do with the Form of actions, not with their Essence. Let it be thought what this means! He emphatically adds p. This shows beyond all possibility of contradiction that Kant does not represent the alleged moral law as a fact of consciousness , capable [Pg 44] of empirical proof—which is how the later would-be philosophers, both individually and collectively, wish to pass it off.

In discarding every empirical basis for Morals, he rejects all internal, and still more decidedly all external, experience. That would be an empirical foundation. Instead of this, pure conceptions a priori , i. Let us consider the full meaning of such a position. Human consciousness as well as the whole external world, together with all the experience and all the facts they comprise, are swept from under our feet.

We have nothing to stand upon. And what have we to hold to? Nothing but a few entirely abstract, entirely unsubstantial conceptions, floating in the air equally with ourselves. It is from these, or, more correctly, from the mere form of their connection with judgments made, that a Law is declared to proceed, which by so-called absolute necessity is supposed to be valid, and to be strong enough to lay bit and bridle on the surging throng of human desires, on the storm of passion, on the giant might of egoism.

We shall see if such be the case. With this preconceived notion that the basis of Morals must be necessarily and strictly a priori, and entirely free from everything empirical, another of [Pg 45] Kant's favourite ideas is closely connected. The moral principle that he seeks to establish is, he says, a synthetic proposition a priori, of merely formal contents , and hence exclusively a matter of Pure Reason ; and accordingly, as such, to be regarded as valid not only for men , but for all possible rational beings ; indeed he declares it to hold good for man "on this account alone," i.

Here lies the cause of his basing the Moral principle not on any feeling, but on pure Reason which knows nothing but itself and the statement of its antithesis.

So that this pure Reason is taken, not as it really and exclusively is—an intellectual faculty of man—but as a self-existent hypostatic essence , yet without the smallest authority; the pernicious effects of such example and precedent being sufficiently shown in the pitiful philosophy of the present day. Indeed, this view of Morals as existing not for men, as men, but for all rational beings, as such, is with Kant a principle so firmly established, an idea so favourite, that he is never tired of repeating it at every opportunity.

I, on the contrary, maintain that we are never entitled to raise into a genus that which we only know of in a single species. For we could bring nothing into our idea of the genus but what we had abstracted from this one species; so that what we should predicate of the genus could after all only be understood of the single species. While, if we should attempt to think away without any warrant the particular attributes of the species, in order to form [Pg 46] our genus , we should perhaps remove the exact condition whereby the remaining attributes, hypostatised as a genus , are made possible.

Just as we recognise intelligence in general to be an attribute of animal beings alone, and are therefore never justified in thinking of it as existing outside, and independent, of animal nature; so we recognise Reason as the exclusive attribute of the human race, and have not the smallest right to suppose that Reason exists externally to it, and then proceed to set up a genus called "Rational Beings," differing from its single known species "Man"; still less are we warranted in laying down laws for such imaginary rational beings in the abstract.

To talk of rational beings external to men is like talking of heavy beings external to bodies. One cannot help suspecting that Kant was thinking a little of the dear cherubim, or at any rate counted on their presence in the conviction of the reader.

In any case this doctrine contains a tacit assumption of an anima rationalis, which as being entirely different from the anima sensitiva , and the anima vegetativa , is supposed to persist after death, and then to be indeed nothing else but rationalis. But in the Kritik der Reinen Vernunft Kant himself has expressly and elaborately made an end of this most transcendent hypostasis. Nevertheless, in his ethics generally, and in the Kritik der Praktischen Vernunft especially, there seems always to hover in the background the thought that the inner and eternal essence, of man consists of Reason.

In this connection, where the matter only occurs incidentally, I must content myself with [Pg 47] simply asserting the contrary. Reason, as indeed the intellectual faculty as a whole, is secondary, is an attribute of phaenomena, being in point of fact conditioned by the organism; whereas it is the Will in man which is his very self, the only part of him which is metaphysical, and therefore indestructible.

The success with which Kant had applied his method to the theoretical side of philosophy led him on to extend it to the practical. Here also he endeavoured to separate pure a priori from empirical a posteriori knowledge.

For this purpose he assumed that just as we know a priori the laws of Space, of Time, and of Causality, so in like manner, or at any rate analogously, we have the moral plumb-line for our conduct given us prior to all experience, and revealed in a Categorical Imperative, an absolute "Ought.

The latter are nothing but the expression of the forms, i. While the former, the so-called moral law, is something that experience pours ridicule on at every step; indeed, as Kant himself says, it is doubtful whether in practice it has ever really been followed on any single occasion.

How completely unlike are the things [Pg 48] which are here classed together under the conception of apriority! Moreover, Kant overlooked the fact that, according to his own teaching, in theoretical philosophy, it is exactly the Apriority of our knowledge of Time, Space, and Causality—independent as this is of experience—that limits it strictly to phaenomena, i.

Similarly, when we turn to practical philosophy, his alleged moral law, if it have an a priori origin in ourselves, must also be only phaenomenal, and leave entirely untouched the essential nature of things.

Only this conclusion would stand in the sharpest contradiction as much to the facts themselves, as to Kant's view of them. For it is precisely the moral principle in us that he everywhere e. But of this he failed to take account. In Chapter II. But he felt the need of some basis for them, and accordingly went so far as to require that the conception of duty itself should be also the ground of its fulfilment ; in other words, that it should itself be its own enforcement.

An action, he says p. This assertion, which is revolting to true moral sentiment; this apotheosis of lovelessness, the exact opposite, as it is, of the Christian doctrine of Morals, which places love before everything else, and teaches that without it nothing profiteth 1 Cor. It appears that some passages in the Kritik der Praktischen Vernunft , which exactly suit this connection, were the immediate occasion of the verses.

Thus, for instance, on p. What slavish morality! And again on p. Furthermore, on p. Whereas I, on the contrary, ask the reader to reflect that it is the intention alone which decides as to the moral worth, or worthlessness, off an action, so that the same act may deserve condemnation or praise according to the intention which determined it. Hence it is that, whenever men discuss a proceeding to which some moral importance is attached, the intention is always investigated, and by this standard alone the matter is judged; as, likewise, it is in the intention alone that every one seeks [Pg 51] justification, if he see his conduct misinterpreted or excuse, if its consequence be mischievous.

It is: "The necessity of an action out of respect for the law. And not only this; Kant himself admits p. In what sense then can necessity be attributed to such an action? As it is only fair always to put the most favourable interpretation on an author's words, we will suppose him to mean that an act true to duty is objectively necessary, but subjectively accidental. Only it is precisely this that is more easily said than thought for where is the Object of this objective necessity, the consequence of which for the most part, perhaps indeed always, fails to be realised in objective reality!

With every wish to be unbiassed, I cannot but think that the expression— necessity of an action —is nothing but an artificially concealed, very forced paraphrase of the word "ought. Similarly in the note on p. The direct determination of the will by a law, and the consciousness that it is so determined—this is what is denoted by Achtung " In what language?

In German the proper term is Gehorsam. But the word Achtung , so unsuitable as it is, cannot without a reason have been put in place of the word Gehorsam. It must serve some purpose; and this is obviously none other than to veil the derivation of the imperative form, and of the conception of duty, from theological Morals; just as we saw above that the expression "necessity of an action," which is such a forced and awkward substitute for the word "shall," was only chosen because "shall" is the exact language of the Decalogue.

The above definition: "Duty is the necessity of an action out of respect for the law," would therefore read in natural, undisguised, plain language: "Duty signifies an action which ought to be done out of obedience to a law.

But now as to the Law, which is the real foundation stone of the Kantian Ethics. What does it contain? And where is it inscribed? This is the chief [Pg 53] point of inquiry. In the first place, be it observed that we have two questions to deal with: the one has to do with the Principle , the other with the Basis of Ethics—two entirely different things, although they are frequently, and sometimes indeed intentionally, confused.

The principle or main proposition of an ethical system is the shortest and most concise definition of the line of conduct which it prescribes, or, if it have no imperative form, of the line of conduct to which it attaches real moral worth.

We may easily convince ourselves of this by recalling all the most familiar principles of Morals. As, however, in what follows I have no intention of imitating acrobatic tricks of this sort, but purpose proceeding with all honesty and straightforwardness, I cannot make the principle of Ethics equivalent to its basis, but must keep the two quite separate.

Do harm to no one; but rather help all people, as far as lies in your power. This is in truth the proposition which all ethical writers expend their energies in endeavouring to account for.

Hence it is itself nothing but the [Pg 55] Datum the thing given , in relation to which the Quaesitum the thing required is the problem of every ethical system, as also of the present prize essay.

The solution of this riddle will disclose the real foundation of Ethics, which, like the philosopher's stone, has been searched for from time immemorial. This is true, for instance, even of that trite and apparently elementary maxim: Quod tibi fieri non vis, alteri ne feceris [8] Do not to another what you are unwilling should be done to yourself.

The defect here is that the wording only touches the duties imposed by law, not those required by virtue;—a thing which can be easily remedied by the omission of non and ne. Thus changed, it really means nothing else than: Neminem laede, immo omnes, quantum potes, juva.

The same is true of every other principle or leading proposition of Ethics that has hitherto been put forward. If we now return to the above question:—how does the law read, in obeying which, according to Kant, duty consists? I again call attention to what I have already examined at the outset—I mean, the Kantian claim that the principle of Ethics must be purely a priori and purely formal, indeed an a priori synthetical proposition, which consequently may not contain anything material, nor rest upon anything empirical, whether objectively in the external world, or subjectively in consciousness, such as any feeling, inclination, impulse, and the like.

Kant was perfectly aware of the difficulty of this position; for on p. This is a process which we may find symbolised in chemistry, where out of three invisible gases Azote, Hydrogen, and Chlorine [9] , and thus in apparently empty space, solid sal-ammoniac is evolved before our eyes. I will, however, explain, more clearly than Kant either would or could, the method whereby he accomplishes this difficult task. The demonstration is all the more necessary because what he did appears to be seldom properly understood.

Almost all Kant's disciples have fallen into the mistake of supposing that he presents his Categorical Imperative directly as a fact of consciousness. But in that case its origin would be anthropological, and, as resting on experience, although internal, it would have an empirical basis: a position which runs directly counter to the Kantian view, and which he repeatedly rejects.

Thus on p. Jahrhunderts , No. And this is precisely what he never does. Whereas in Reinhold's Formula concordiae des Kriticismus , [10] we actually read on p. This would of course be "a charming thesis , with a very pretty hypothesis to boot. If that were true, Ethics would indubitably have a basis of incomparable solidity, and there would be no need of any questions being set for prize essays, to encourage inquiry in this direction. But the greatest marvel would be, that men had been so slow in discovering such a fact of consciousness, considering [Pg 59] that for the space of thousands of years a basis for Morals has been sought after with zealous patient toil.

How Kant himself is responsible for this deplorable mistake, I shall explain further on; nevertheless, one cannot but wonder at the undisputed predominance of such a radical error among his disciples. Have they never, whilst writing all their numberless books on the Kantian philosophy, noticed the disfigurement which the Kritik der Reinen Vernunft underwent in the second edition, and which made it an incoherent, self-contradictory work?

It seems that this has only now come to light; and, in my opinion, the fact has been quite correctly analysed in Rosenkranz's preface to the second volume of his complete edition of Kant's works.

We must, however, remember that many scholars, being unceasingly occupied as teachers and authors, find very little time left for private and exact research.

It is certain that docendo disco I learn by teaching is not unconditionally true; sometimes indeed one is tempted to parody it by saying: semper docendo nihil disco by always teaching I learn nothing ; and even what Diderot puts into the mouth of Rameau's nephew is not altogether without reason: "'And as for these teachers, do you suppose they understand the sciences they give instruction in?

Not a bit of it, my dear sir, not a bit of it. If they possessed sufficient knowledge to be able to teach them, they would not do so. Lichtenberg too says: "I have rather observed that professional people are often exactly those who do [Pg 60] not know best. Thus the foundation which Kant gave to his moral law by no means consists in its being proved empirically to be a fact of consciousness; neither does he base it on an appeal to moral feeling, nor yet on a petitio principii , under its fine modern name of an "absolute Postulate.

Kant, be it observed, ridiculed all empirical stimuli of the will, and began by removing everything, whether subjective or objective, on which a law determining the will's action could be empirically based. The consequence is, that he has nothing left for the substance of his law but simply its Form. Now this can only be the abstract conception of lawfulness. But the conception of lawfulness is built up out of what is valid for all persons equally.

Therefore the substance of the law consists of the conception of what is universally valid, and its contents are of course nothing else than its universal validity. Hence the formula will read as follows: "Act only in accordance with that precept which you can also wish should be a general law for all rational beings.

Compare also the Kritik der Praktischen Vernunft , p. I pay Kant a tribute of sincere admiration for the great acumen he displayed in carrying out this dexterous feat, but I continue in all seriousness my examination of his position according to the standard of truth. The present Essay is one of the most important contributions to Ethics since the time of Kant, and, as such, is indispensable to a thorough knowledge of the subject. Moreover, from whatever point of view it be regarded, — whether the reader finds when he closes the book, that his conviction harmonises with the conclusion reached, or not; it would be difficult to find any treatise on Moral Science more calculated to stimulate thought, and lift it out of infantile imitation of some prescribed pattern.

The believer in the Kantian, or any other, basis of Ethics, could hardly measure the strength or the weakness of his own position more surely than by comparing it with the Schopenhauerian; while he who is yet in search of a foundation will find much in the following pages to claim his attention.